Ricardo D. Salvatore

Close encounters of empire : writing the cultural history of U.S.-Latin American relations

New concerns with the intersections of culture and power, historical agency, and the complexity of social and political life are producing new questions about the United States’ involvement with Latin America. Turning away from political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters and victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking collection suggest alternate ways of understanding the role that U.S. actors and agencies have played in the region during the postcolonial period. Exploring a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters in Latin America, these theoretically engaged essays by distinguished U.S. and Latin American historians and anthropologists illuminate a wide range of subjects. From the Rockefeller Foundation’s public health initiatives in Central America to the visual regimes of film, art, and advertisements; these essays grapple with new ways of conceptualizing public and private spheres of empire. As such, Close Encounters of Empire initiates a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the long-standing scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in the Americas as it rethinks the cultural dimensions of nationalism and development.

Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times

Crowning a decade of innovative efforts in the historical study of law and legal phenomena in the region, Crime and Punishment in Latin America offers a collection of essays that deal with the multiple aspects of the relationship between ordinary people and the law. Building on a variety of methodological and theoretical trends—cultural history, subaltern studies, new political history, and others—the contributors share the conviction that law and legal phenomena are crucial elements in the formation and functioning of modern Latin American societies and, as such, need to be brought to the forefront of scholarly debates about the region’s past and present. While disassociating law from a strictly legalist approach, the volume showcases a number of highly original studies on topics such as the role of law in processes of state formation and social and political conflict, the resonance between legal and cultural phenomena, and the contested nature of law-enforcing discourses and practices. Treating law as an ambiguous and malleable arena of struggle, the contributors to this volume—scholars from North and Latin America who represent the new wave in legal history that has emerged in recent years-- demonstrate that law not only produces and reformulates culture, but also shapes and is shaped by larger processes of political, social, economic, and cultural change. In addition, they offer valuable insights about the ways in which legal systems and cultures in Latin America compare to those in England, Western Europe, and the United States. This volume will appeal to scholars in Latin American studies and to those interested in the social, cultural, and comparative history of law and legal phenomena. Contributors. Carlos Aguirre, Dain Borges, Lila Caimari, Arlene J. Diaz, Luis A. Gonzalez, Donna J. Guy, Douglas Hay, Gilbert M. Joseph, Juan Manuel Palacio, Diana Paton, Pablo Piccato, Cristina Rivera Garza, Kristin Ruggiero, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Charles F. Walker

The Normalization of Economic Life: Representations of the Economy in Golden-Age Buenos Aires, 1890-1913

This essay examines the cultural impact of the market transition in Buenos Aires during the so-called golden age (ca. 1890–1913), when Argentina experienced a process of export-led growth, centered on agriculture and livestock. The international mobility of labor and capital resources, in a context of an expanding frontier, facilitated rapid and important gains in productivity. By the turn of the century, a model of accumulation based on mass immigration, foreign capital, and the redistribution and use of land taken from indigenous peoples was firmly established. Important changes in technology (breed selection and threshing machines) and social relations (tenancy and sharecropping) modified the landscape of the pampas. The city experienced more directly the turmoil of “progress,” receiving massive inflows of immigrants from Europe and rapidly absorbing modern means of transportation and distribution. Soon, a large consumer market developed, underscoring the modernity of the city’s economy. Some scholars view this period as a turning point in the history of Argentina. Social and urban historians have noted two fundamental changes: the revolution of wheat that transformed the social landscape of the pampas; and the modernization of the city that ultimately allowed some improvement in the living conditions of immigrant workers. Labor historians found in this period a deepening of class confrontations: the transition from artisan-based and ethnically divided working-class communities to a politically active and organized working-class movement under socialist and anarchist leadership. The very success of capital accumulation made the disparities in the distribution of income and wealth all the more evident, facilitating the diffusion of radical ideologies. Anarchist-dominated labor unions, mutual-aid societies, socialist cultural centers, and renewed activism within the workshops signaled the emergence of class politics.

Progress and Backwardness in Book Accumulation: Bancroft, Basadre, and Their Libraries

The essay examines the conditions of book accumulation in two places in the world economy, California and Peru, through the narratives left by book collector Hubert Bancroft and librarian and historian Jorge Basadre. A reading of these reveals the complex interrelations between socioeconomic development and cultural accumulation. In California, Bancroft turned his fortune accumulated through business into a unique book collection and this, in turn, was placed at the service of a “factory of history” that produced a multivolume “History of the Pacific States of North America.” In the Peruvian case, after a fire destroyed most of the collections of the National Library of Lima, historian Basadre directed an effort of reconstruction that led him to reflect upon the states neglect of cultural patrimony, popular disdain for high culture, and Perus long tradition of exporting books and documents to foreign collectors and libraries. Basadres reflections speak of the position of a peripheral intellectual within a context of underdevelopment. I examine the centripetal logic of book accumulation and call for further engagement with this neglected side of cultural history.